Photos: Thousands at Auschwitz for yearly Holocaust memorial event

World News

Mon, 24 Apr 2017

Associated Press

1 of 6

Participants of the yearly March of the Living walk through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work sets you free) entrance gate in the former German Nazi Death Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oswiecim, Poland. (AP Photo)

Warsaw, Poland: Thousands of people from around the world, many of them young Israelis, paid homage Monday to the millions who perished in the Holocaust at the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz.

The event, the March of the Living, is a sombre memorial march of about three kilometers (two miles) from the original Auschwitz camp to Birkenau, a much larger death camp where Jews were murdered in gas chambers in German-occupied Poland.

Participants gathered under and near the main gate with the infamous sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Set You Free).

The blowing of a shofar, a ram's horn used for religious purposes, was the signal for the large group to begin marching in silence down the main street of Oswiecim, past fields and along the historic train tracks that once brought people to their deaths at Birkenau.

Many carried little wooden plaques with messages of remembrance that they placed on the railway tracks.

The yearly march is also aimed at instilling a desire in Israeli youth to protect the Jewish state, and many people carried Israeli flags.